Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed

By Stephen O'Connor

The true story behind Christina Baker Kline’s bestselling novel is revealed in this “engaging and thoughtful history” of the Children’s Aid Society (Los Angeles Times).

A powerful blend of history, biography, and adventure, Orphan Trains fills a grievous gap in the American story. Tracing the evolution of the Children’s Aid Society, this dramatic narrative tells the fascinating tale of one of the most famous—and sometimes infamous—child welfare programs: the orphan trains, which spirited away some two hundred fifty thousand abandoned children into the homes of rural families in the Midwest. In mid-nineteenth-century New York, vagrant children, whether orphans or runaways, filled the streets. The city’s solution for years had been to sweep these children into prisons or almshouses. But a young minister named Charles Loring Brace took a different tack. With the creation of the Children’s Aid Society in 1853, he provided homeless youngsters with shelter, education, and, for many, a new family out west. The family matching process was haphazard, to say the least: at town meetings, farming families took their pick of the orphan train riders. Some children, such as James Brady, who became governor of Alaska, found loving homes, while others, such as Charley Miller, who shot two boys on a train in Wyoming, saw no end to their misery. Complete with extraordinary photographs and deeply moving stories, Orphan Trains gives invaluable insights into a creative genius whose pioneering, if controversial, efforts inform child rescue work today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9780547523705

Stephen O'Connor

Stephen O’Connor is the author of three books: Rescue (a collection of short fiction and poetry), Will My Name Be Shouted Out? (a work of memoir and social analysis), and Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed (a narrative history). His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Conjunctions, The Quarterly, Partisan Review, The New England Review, and elsewhere. His poetry has been in Poetry Magazine, The Missouri Review, Agni, Knockout, and Green Mountains Review. His essays and journalism have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, and elsewhere. O’Connor is the recipient of the Cornell Woolrich Fellowship in Creative Writing from Columbia University, the Visiting Fellowship for Historical Research by Artists and Writers from the American Antiquarian Society, and the DeWitt Wallace/Reader's Digest Fellowship from the MacDowell Colony. He teaches in the writing MFA programs of Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence. For eight years he directed and taught in Teachers & Writers Collaborative’s flagship creative writing program at a public school in New York City. He has received a B.A. from Columbia University, and an M.A. from the University of California at Berkeley, both in English literature. He lives with his wife and daughter in New York City.

Book preview

[Image]

Table of Contents

Title Page

Table of Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Epigraph

Working for Human Happiness

WANT

The Good Father

Flood of Humanity

DOING

City Missionary

Draining the City, Saving the Children

Journey to Dowagiac

A Voice Among the Newsboys

Happy Circle

Photos

Almost a Miracle

REDOING

Invisible Children

Neglect of the Poor

The Trials of Charley Miller

The Death and Life of Charles Loring Brace

Legacy

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Copyright © 2001 by Stephen O’Connor

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

O’Connor, Stephen.

Orphan trains : the story of Charles Loring Brace and the children he saved and failed / Stephen O’Connor.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-395-84173-9

1. Orphan trains—History. 2. Brace, Charles Loring, 1826–1890. 3. Children’s Aid Society (New York, N.Y.)—History. I. Title.

HV985 .O36 2001

362.73 4 0973—dc21 00-053881

All illustrations courtesy of the Children’s Aid Society

eISBN 978-0-547-52370-5

v2.1014

To Simon and Emma

Acknowledgments

This book could never have been written without the help of many people. First and foremost is Janet Graham, codirector of the PBS documentary The Orphan Trains, who so generously passed on her topic to me, shared her insights and copious research materials, and arranged for me to be granted access to the archives of the Children’s Aid Society. Her moving and intelligent film was an inspiration and touchstone throughout my research and writing.

I also want to thank Robert Dykstra for his advice and encouragement and for the hours of work he put into saving me from my own ignorance; and Nesta King for her generosity and intelligence. What mistakes remain in this book are entirely my own.

This book also could not have come into existence without the wisdom, trust, and kindness of many people at the Children’s Aid Society: Phil Coltoff, T. Jewett, Anne McCabe, Michael Wagner, Lydia King, and Lisa Glazer. I particularly want to thank Victor Remmer, a former CAS director and its present archivist, for helping me find my way around the dusty filing cabinets and weighty tomes that he watches over on East Forty-fifth Street, and for sharing his hard-earned insights, both as a longtime worker in the trenches of child welfare and as a historian of the CAS.

I owe an immense debt of gratitude to all the former orphan train riders who spoke so candidly and movingly with me about their experiences: Alice Bullis Ayler, Marguerite Thomson, Arthur Smith, Howard Hurd, Anne Harrison, and Harold Williams. Thanks also to Mary Ellen Johnson, the founder of the Orphan Train Heritage Society of America, for her hospitality and advice, and for having had the compassion and courage to help so many people.

For doing so much to help me understand the true nature of foster care now and in the past, I want to thank Keith Hefner and Al Desetta at Foster Care Youth United, and Baudilio Lozado, Donald Stroman, Matthew Dedewo, Yamina McDonald, and Diana Moreno, who endured my interrogations so patiently.

Many other people gave me invaluable aid in understanding the complexities of child welfare now and in the past. They include: Marcia Robinson Lowry of Children’s Rights; Bruce Henry, Maxine Shoulders, and Ximena Rua-Merkin of Covenant House; Verna Eggleston and Joyce Hunter of the Hetrick Martin Institute; Philip Genty of Columbia University Law School; Liz Squires of the Administration for Children’s Services; and Ellen Schutz, Mary Jane Sclafani, Jill Hayes, Fred Magovern, Hank Orenstein, John Courtney, Edith Holtzer, LynNell Hancock, Janis Ruden, Steve Shapiro, and Christina Lem.

I also want to thank the American Antiquarian Society, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the MacDowell Colony for doing so much to make me a wiser, saner, and better writer.

My thanks also to Kathy Newman, Paul Attewell, Rob Cohen, and Claudia Cooper for their good food and conversation, and comfortable beds, during my Worcester sojourns; Wendy Holt and Janet Silver for all their patience and invaluable help with the manuscript; Steve Fraser for getting me off to such a good start; Kim Witherspoon for her years of faith and friendship; and Lyda Schuster for all of her help on two books.

And finally, I want to thank Simon and Emma for putting up with so many bouts of half-orphanhood during the years I worked on this book; and Helen, for everything, always.

There’s a great work wants doing in this our generation, Charley—let’s off jacket and go about it.

Frederick Law Olmsted

Prologue

Working for Human Happiness

ON THE MORNING of October 1, 1854, forty-five children sat on the front benches of a meetinghouse in Dowagiac, Michigan. Most were between ten and twelve years old, though at least one was six and a few were young teenagers. During the week the meetinghouse served as a school, but on that day, a Sunday, it was a Presbyterian church, and more than usually crowded, not only because the children had taken so many seats, but because the regular parishioners had been augmented by less devout neighbors curious to see the orphans.

For the last couple of weeks notices had been running in the newspapers, and bills had been posted at the general store, the tavern, and the railroad station asking families to take in homeless boys and girls from New York City. The children had arrived on the train from Detroit at three that morning and had huddled together on the station platform until sunup. They had spent the previous night on a steamer crossing Lake Erie from Buffalo, New York, and not a one of them had avoided being soiled by seasickness—their own or their fellow passengers’—or by the excreta of the animals traveling on the deck above. The night before, they had slept on the floor of an absolutely dark freight car, amid a crowd of German and Irish immigrants heading west from Albany. During their first night out from New York City, on a riverboat traveling up the Hudson, they had slept in proper berths, with blankets and mattresses—but only because the boat’s captain, after hearing the tales they told of their lives, had taken pity on them.

The children’s days of hard travel were clearly evident in their pallor and the subtle deflation of their features. Their clothes—which had been new when they left New York—were stained and ripped and emitted a distinct animal rankness. Their expressions were wary, as if they had been caught doing something wrong and were wondering whether they were going to be punished. In some of the younger children this wariness verged on fear, but most of the older boys and girls had known too much disappointment and loneliness to be afraid of what was about to happen to them, or at least to reveal that fear, even to themselves. Some of them cast glances—challenging, or ingratiating—back at the men and women seated behind them; some looked down at their shoes, while others stared straight ahead at the young man beside the altar, whose enthusiasm, accent, and fluid gestures marked him as a city preacher. His name was E. P. Smith, and he was telling the audience about the organization he represented: the Children’s Aid Society, which had been founded only one and a half years earlier by a young minister named Charles Loring Brace.

Brace, a native of Hartford, Connecticut, had come to New York in 1848 to study theology and had been horrified both by the hordes of vagrant children—beggars, bootblacks, flower sellers, and prostitutes—who crowded the city’s streets and by the way civil authorities treated them. Mass poverty was a new problem during that era. Up through the early nineteenth century there had been no slums in American cities. There had been poor people, of course, and run-down houses on the back streets and disreputable taverns on the waterfronts, but none of the large, decaying neighborhoods of fear and despair that are so ubiquitous in urban America today. Beginning shortly after the War of 1812, torrential immigration and the nation’s uneasy transition to industrial capitalism had divided American cities into hostile camps of the affluent and the desperately poor. In no city was this division more pronounced than New York, which started the nineteenth century with a population of less than 40,000 and ended it with close to a million and a half. In 1849 New York’s first police chief reported that 3,000 children¹—or close to 1 percent of the city’s total population—lived on the streets and had no place to sleep but in alleys and abandoned buildings or under stairways. At first the authorities had dealt with these vagrant children mainly by incarcerating them in adult prisons and almshouses, and then, beginning in the 1820s, by building juvenile prisons and asylums, which were barely less harsh or punitive.

Brace believed that most of these children were not criminals but victims of miserable economic and social conditions. Incarceration did nothing but harden them in the ways of crime. What they really needed, he maintained, was education, jobs, and good homes—and in March 1853 he established an organization to provide them with just such benefits.

During its first year the Children’s Aid Society primarily offered its young beneficiaries religious guidance at Sunday meetings and vocational and academic instruction at its industrial schools. It also established the nation’s first runaway shelter, the Newsboys’ Lodging House, where vagrant boys received inexpensive room and board and basic education. From the beginning Brace and his colleagues attempted to find jobs and homes for individual children, but they soon became overwhelmed by the numbers needing placement. Unable to raise enough money to increase his staff, Brace hit on the idea of sending groups of children to the country and letting local residents simply pick out the child they wanted for themselves. The forty-five young people sitting in the Dowagiac meetinghouse were the first of these groups—and the first riders of what would come to be called the orphan trains.

As Smith explained the program to his audience, he appealed equally to their consciences and pocketbooks. These were the little ones of Christ, he said, who had the same capacities, the same need of good influences, and the same immortal soul as our own children. Kind men and women who opened their homes to one of this ragged regiment would be expected to raise them as they would their natural-born children, providing them with decent food and clothing, a common education, and $100 when they turned twenty-one. There would be no loss in the charity, Smith assured his audience. The boys were handy and active and would soon learn any common trade or labor. The girls could be used for all types of housework.

When he had finished speaking, bench-legs squawked on the floorboards and the congregation came forward to get a better look at the children. Some of these men and women were shopkeepers, carpenters, or blacksmiths, and one was a physician; most, however, were farmers. Their faces were gaunt (only the wealthy were fat in the nineteenth century) and reddened by sun, wind, and, in not a few cases, whiskey. As they mingled with Smith’s party, some blinked back tears that such innocents should already have known so much hardship, others looked them up and down and asked questions, trying to assess their strength and honesty, while one or two went so far as to squeeze the children’s muscles or plunge a finger into their mouths to check their teeth.

The actual distribution of the children commenced the following morning at the tavern where they were staying. In an account of the trip published by the Children’s Aid Society, Smith said that in order to get a child, applicants had to have recommendations from their pastor and a justice of the peace, but it is unlikely that this requirement was strictly enforced. In the early days the society’s agents tended to be very casual in both the acquisition and dispersal of their charges. Smith himself had let a passenger on the riverboat from Manhattan take one of the boys and had replaced him with another he met in the Albany railroad yard—a boy whose claim to orphanhood Smith never bothered to verify. When applicants did not have the required documents, Smith probably did what was done routinely by later CAS agents: he looked at the quality and cleanness of the applicants’ clothes, asked them about their property, professions, and church attendance, and, if he saw no evidence that they were liars or degenerates, gave them a child.

By the end of that first day (a Monday), fifteen boys and girls had gone to live with local farmers or craftsmen, and by Thursday evening, twenty-two more had been taken. On Friday, Smith and the eight unclaimed children—the youngest and therefore the least able workers—continued west from Dowagiac by train. In Chicago, Smith put them by themselves on a train to Iowa City (one and a half days’ journey), where a Reverend C. C. Townsend, who ran a local orphanage, took them in and attempted to find them foster families. As for Smith, he caught the first train back to New York.

Despite the fact that the Children’s Aid Society heard practically nothing of most of these children ever again, this first expedition was considered such a success that in January the society sent out two more parties of homeless children, both to Pennsylvania. Over the next seventy-five years the CAS orphan trains carried an estimated 105,000 children to all of the contiguous forty-eight states except Arizona. For most of those years the children were distributed to their new parents or employers (both terms were used) much as they had been by E. P. Smith, through a sort of auction held in a church, opera house, or large store. Applicants for children were supposed to be screened by committees of local businessmen, ministers, or physicians, but the screening was rarely very thorough. The monitoring of placements was equally lax. Because of the great difficulty and expense of travel in nineteenth-century rural America, CAS agents rarely checked up in person on the boys and girls they had placed. The society tried to keep tabs on placements by sending both the children and their foster parents regular letters of inquiry, but these mostly went unanswered.

Sustained by a monitoring system that seriously underreported failure and by a prodigious quantity of blind faith, Charles Loring Brace tirelessly promoted what he called the Emigration Plan during his thirty-seven years at the head of the Children’s Aid Society. In moving and persuasive books, articles, speeches, and annual reports, he portrayed his system of placing needy and orphaned children in families as more humane and effective than even the best institutional care, and also as vastly cheaper. As a result, Brace’s system was imitated by many organizations, initially only in the East but eventually all across the country. The New York Foundling Hospital alone sent some 30,000 children west.

All told, by 1929, when the CAS sent its last true orphan train to Texas, roughly 250,000 city children had found foster homes through these programs. Some of these children were abused by their new families in all the ways that we are familiar with from present-day news reports about the tragedies of foster care, and some were just as happy as the literature of their placement agencies said they were. Two boys placed by the CAS became governors, one became a Supreme Court justice, and several others became mayors, congressmen, or local representatives. Many children grew up to become drifters and thieves, and at least one became a murderer. The vast majority led lives of absolutely ordinary accomplishment and satisfaction. And many, perhaps also a majority (because there is nothing extraordinary about unhappiness), saw no end to the misery into which they had been born.

This book concentrates on the CAS orphan trains, not only because the society placed considerably more children over a much longer period than any other agency, but because Charles Loring Brace almost single-handedly forged the philosophical foundations of the movement, and of many other efforts on behalf of poor children, and remains to this day perhaps the preeminent figure in American child welfare history. Until well into the twentieth century, virtually every program seeking to help homeless and needy children was either inspired by or a response to Brace’s work and ideas. His notion that children are better cared for by families than in institutions is the most basic tenet of present-day foster care. And his abiding belief in the capability and fundamental goodness of poor city children, while occasionally echoed in the speeches of politicians and child welfare experts, is one that our nation dearly needs to reclaim.

Brace was an exceedingly hardworking, intelligent, and complex man whose life can hardly be defined by his work with the Children’s Aid Society. He was jailed in Hungary for supposed revolutionary activities, and he was a prominent abolitionist, author, and journalist. As a New York Times correspondent during the Civil War, he was present at some of the Union Army’s most stunning early defeats. Brace’s best friend for much of his young manhood was Frederick Law Olmsted, the celebrated designer of Central Park, and his social contacts included Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Washington Irving, and George Eliot.

With all of his drive and accomplishment, Brace was a man of many contradictions. He was ferociously ambitious, yet believed that ambition was a sin. He constantly excoriated himself for not living up to his own ideals—for not working hard enough, loving well enough, or having motives that were pure enough—but he never seems to have doubted the exemplariness of his character. He could speak quite openly about his abounding courage and hope. He proclaimed without the slightest shred of irony, I am striving after perfect truth, and admitted, as if it were only self-evident, that few human beings have ever had a more real sense of things unseen than I habitually have. And yet he believed that virtue existed only in humility and self-denial. He wanted always to live more simply and to endure greater hardship. What he called his brightest of all visions was a humble, self-controlled life, all devoted, given up, to working for human happiness.²

As much as Brace’s work with the Children’s Aid Society may have satisfied his desire for prestige and power, it was nevertheless the single greatest moral effort of his life. In simplest terms, this book is an attempt to measure the virtue of that effort by examining its motives and by tracing its consequences, both during Brace’s lifetime and after. The earliest chapters explore what in Brace’s experiences and era made the idea of sending even small children hundreds of miles from home to live with total strangers seem natural and good. Later chapters discuss the successes and failures of Brace’s efforts, and those of his imitators, and show how changing ideas of childhood, work, bondage, and the nature of society caused what had once seemed an act of nearly unassailable wisdom and compassion to appear cruelly indifferent to the very children it had been designed to help.

The true measure of the virtue of Brace’s effort lies in its effect on the lives of these children. This book illustrates that effect by looking at the fates of orphan train riders in aggregate, and by telling the stories of particular children: John Jackson, who at five years old walked off after a marching band and never found his way home again; a lame street peddler named Johnny Morrow, who won over the Children’s Aid Society staff by fulfilling their most sentimental fantasies; Lotte Stern, a ragpicker’s fourteen-year-old daughter who, like so many girls of her time, was forced into prostitution and then damned for it by society; John Brady and Andrew Burke, who rode the same orphan train in 1859 and became, respectively, the governors of Alaska and North Dakota; and Charley Miller, who shot two young men dead on a boxcar in Wyoming because, as he put it at his trial, he was lonely and cold and so far from home.

A cautionary note: although the term orphan trains has a poetic resonance and a degree of recognition that made it the all-but-inevitable title for this book, in some ways it misrepresents the placement efforts of the CAS and other agencies. During the orphan train era itself, none of these agencies ever actually used the term in their official publications. The CAS referred to its relevant division first as the Emigration Department, then as the Home-Finding Department, and finally, as the Department of Foster Care. The Foundling Hospital sent out what it called baby or mercy trains. And almost everybody else referred to the practice as family placement or out-placement (out to distinguish it from the placement of children in orphanages or asylums). The term orphan trains may have been coined by a journalist sometime in the early twentieth century, but it did not come into its present wide currency until long after the close of the era, perhaps as recently as 1978, when CBS aired a fictional miniseries entitled The Orphan Trains.

One reason the term was not used by placement agencies was that less than half of the children who rode the trains were in fact orphans, and as many as 25 percent had two living parents. Children with both parents living ended up on the trains—or in orphanages—because their families did not have the money or desire to raise them or because they had been abused or abandoned or had run away. And many teenage boys and girls went to orphan train sponsoring organizations simply in search of work or a free ticket out of the city.

The term orphan trains is also misleading because a substantial number of the placed-out children never took the railroad to their new homes, or even traveled very far. Although the majority of children placed by the CAS went to the Midwest and West, the state that received the greatest number by far (nearly one-third of the total) was New York; Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania also received substantial numbers of children. The main goal of the Emigration Plan was to remove children from slums, where opportunities were scant and immoral influences plentiful, and to place them in good Christian homes. In part because Brace considered the country fundamentally more beneficent, and in part because the demand for children (as laborers and for adoption) was always highest in the least-settled areas, the typical good Christian home was a farm. But the CAS did place many children not only near New York but right in the city itself.

What is more, for most of the orphan train era, the CAS bureaucracy made no distinction between local placements and even its most distant ones. They were all written up in the same record books and, on the whole, managed by the same people. Also, the same child might be placed one time in the West and the next time—if the first home did not work out—in New York City. The decision about where to place a child was made almost entirely on the basis of which alternative was most readily available at the moment the child needed help.

Because distant and local placements were so functionally interchangeable, discussing only what might be called classic orphan train placement—groups of children distributed far from New York City—would distort the nature and goals of orphan train programs and misrepresent the experiences of many of the placed children. Such a focus would also obscure the fact that, in an important sense, the orphan train era never ended. What really happened is that during the first decades of the twentieth century, as a result of demographic, political, and social changes, fewer and fewer children were sent to homes in other states and more and more were placed locally. Decades before the last orphan train left for Texas, all of the main placement organizations—including the CAS—had become primarily what we would call foster care and adoption agencies. But for the people operating these agencies, the transformation was only in how they did their work (more screening and monitoring of placements), not in the work’s fundamental nature and goals.

It is important—even consummately important—not to obscure the connection between the orphan trains and our own child welfare programs, because the consequences of Brace’s moral effort end—if they may be said to have ended at all—only now, in this moment, and ineach succeeding moment, as we ourselves decide what we can and should do to help the poor and friendless children of our own time. It is my hope that, as we discover how well or ill Brace and his followers promoted the happiness of children during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we will better understand how we might serve those children who most need our help at the start of this new millennium.

PART I

WANT

[Image]

TESTIMONY

JOHN BRADY

I cannot speak of my parents with any certainty at all. I recollect having an aunt by the name of Julia B——. She had me in charge for some time, and made known some things to me of which I have a faint remembrance. She married a gentleman in Boston, and left me to shift for myself in the streets of [New York City]. I could not have been more than seven or eight years of age at the time. She is greatly to be excused for this act, since I was a very bad boy, having an abundance of self-will.

At this period I became a vagrant, roaming over all parts of the city. I would often pick up a meal at the markets or at the docks, where they were unloading fruit. At a later hour in the night I would find a resting-place in some box or hogshead, or in some dark hole under a staircase.

The boys that I fell in company with would steal and swear, and of course I contracted those habits too. I have a distinct recollection of stealing up upon houses to tear lead from the chimneys, and then take it privily away to some junk-shop, as they call it; with the proceeds I would buy a ticket for the pit in the Chatham-street Theatre, and something to eat with the remainder. This is the manner in which I was drifting out in the stream of life, when some kind person from your Society persuaded me to go to Randall’s Island. I remained at this place two years. Sometime in July, 1859, one of your agents came there and asked how many boys who had no parents would love to have nice homes in the West, where they could drive horses and oxen, and have as many apples and melons as they could wish. I happened to be one of the many who responded in the affirmative.

On the fourth of August twenty-one of us had homes procured for us at N——, Ind. A lawyer from T——, who chanced to be engaged in court matters, was at N——at the time. He desired to take a boy home with him, and I was the one assigned him. He owns a farm of two hundred acres lying close to town. Care was taken that I should be occupied there and not in town. I was always treated as one of the family. In sickness I was ever cared for by prompt attention. In winter I was sent to the Public School. The family room was a good school to me, for there I found the daily papers and a fair library.

After a period of several years . . . I had accumulated some property on the farm in the shape of a horse, a yoke of oxen, etc., amounting in all to some $300. These I turned into cash, and left for a preparatory school. . . . I remained there three years, relying greatly on my own efforts for support. . . . I have now resumed my duties as a Sophomore [at Yale], in faith in Him who has ever been my best friend. If I can prepare myself for acting well my part in life by going through the college curriculum, I shall be satisfied.

I shall ever acknowledge with gratitude that the Children’s Aid Society has been the instrument of my elevation.

To be taken from the gutters of New York City and placed in a college is almost a miracle.¹

HARRY MORRIS

When I arrived at N.Y., I never seen so many relations as I had and all was tickled to see me. The Pennsylvania Station has several entrances to get through so as not to miss me, they were coupled at every one. My sister-in-law was the lucky one to see me first.

My, but what a home-coming that was, I will never forget it as long as I live. Would of the Aid Society done justice I would of found my parents long, long before I did. After the reunion I told mother that I was going to the Aid Society and I wanted her to go along. . . . The moment I stepped in the door, the elderly man sitting at the desk recognized my mother and said to her, This isn’t the son that we had, is it? The one we sent out west. My mother said to him, yes, he wants to speak to you in person. Well, what a fine lad this is, he had no more than got lad out of his tongue, then I told him what I thought of the Childrens Aid Society of N.Y.C. and I told him I was going to let the whole world know what kind of people you were and also how you made misrepresentations and I had the pleasure of telling him that the Aid Society never placed me in any home to make me what I was. He sure did back water and he was just like a whipped dog when I got through telling him facts about the life I went through. He begged me to keep mum and offered me reward for not mention of the statements but his money was just like his representatives,—FALSE.²

1

The Good Father

CHARLES LORING BRACE was born on June 19, 1826, in Litchfield, Connecticut, a small but prosperous village, wholly lacking in urban luxury or vice, but providing its residents with something approaching urban levels of learning and culture. It was the home of the nation’s first law school, founded by Tapping Reeve in 1784, which numbered among its graduates Vice Presidents Aaron Burr and John C. Calhoun and the educator Horace Mann. It was also the home of one of the first secondary schools for girls in the United States, the Litchfield Female Academy, graduates of which included Harriet Beecher Stowe and her sister Catharine Beecher. Litchfield’s best-known native son was Ethan Allen, leader of a Revolutionary War militia group, the Green Mountain Boys, but during the Brace family’s tenure the village’s most illustrious resident was the Congregational preacher Lyman Beecher—the father not only of Catharine and Harriet but also of the celebrated (and at times infamous) liberal minister Henry Ward Beecher. The Braces and the Beechers would become deeply intertwined over the years, and each family would exert a profound influence on the development of the other’s social activism.

One of the most important of these influences was in some ways the most indirect. Among his many other accomplishments, Lyman Beecher was a founder of the social movement in which Charles Loring Brace would make his career. In 1812, distressed by increasing drunkenness, crime, and irreligious behavior, especially in America’s rapidly growing cities, Beecher told some thirty Congregational clergymen whom he had invited to a meeting in New Haven: The mass is changing. We are becoming another people. Our habits have held us long after those moral causes that formed them have ceased to operate. These habits, at length, are giving way. If swift action were not taken, Beecher warned, the nation would soon be overrun by a tide of Sabbath-breakers, rum-selling, tippling folk, infidels and ruff-scruff. Beecher proposed combating this tide through the foundation of a Society for the Suppression of Vice and the Promotion of Good Morals. This organization would be a moral militia composed of wise and good citizens who would oppose vice and infidelity by preaching to likely perpetrators, holding prayer meetings, and passing out religious literature.¹

Partly through Beecher’s example and vocal advocacy, similar moral reform societies were soon founded all along the Eastern Seaboard and as far west as Saint Louis. The wise and good who staffed these societies were generally evangelical clerics whose primary goal was to attract converts. Over time, however, these domestic missionaries learned that the best way to draw people to their sermons was by offering benefits such as food, clothing, and schooling. This was the aspect of the movement that ultimately would most impress Charles Loring Brace. He would carry it a step further, however, and thereby help pave the way for the emergence of modern social work, all but abandoning conversion and making service (or aid) the top priority of his own moral reform society.

Lyman Beecher never played any direct role in Brace’s choice of career. He moved to Boston the year Brace was born and was living in Cincinnati when Brace began working with the poor in New York City. The elder Beecher and the Brace family also stood on opposite sides of their era’s culture wars. Whereas the Braces, though devout Congregationalists, were dedicated rationalists with a strong interest in natural science, Lyman Beecher was a conservative Calvinist who saw science and rationalism as the enemies of faith. It was Lyman’s children, especially his two famous daughters, who would forge the strongest ties with the Brace family. But, at the very least, Lyman Beecher presided over Charles’s childhood and youth as an exemplar—a man who made the career of activist-minister a compelling possibility.

John Pierce Brace, Charles’s father, first knew Lyman Beecher as a landlord. John Brace came to Litchfield to be chief instructor at the Litchfield Female Academy and rented a room in the Beechers’ plain, often added-to clapboard parsonage—described by Stowe as a wide, roomy, windy edifice that seemed to have been built by a series of afterthoughts.² Despite their philosophical differences, John Brace soon won at least the cordial respect of the famous minister, if for no other reason than that Brace was the favorite teacher of Beecher’s younger daughter, Harriet. In her autobiography, Stowe called John Brace one of the most stimulating and inspiring instructors I ever knew³ and made him the model for Mr. Rossiter, the brilliant teacher in her novel Oldtown Folks:

Mr. Jonathan Rossiter held us all by the sheer force of his personal character and will, just as the ancient mariner held the wedding guest with his glittering eye. . . . He scorned all conventional rules in teaching, and he would not tolerate a mechanical lesson, and took delight in puzzling his pupils and breaking up all routine business by startling and unexpected questions and assertions. He compelled everyone to think and to think for himself. Your heads may not be the best in the world, was one of his sharp off-hand sayings, but they are the best God has given you, and you must use them for yourselves.⁴

John Brace had come to the Litchfield Female Academy through sheer nepotism. His aunt, Sarah Pierce, founded the school in her dining room in 1792, and she seemed to have pegged her nephew as a potential teacher from his earliest childhood. She and her sister Mary oversaw his education in Hartford, where he had been born, and paid his tuition at Williams College. For a while John seems to have considered entering the ministry, but in 1814 he acceded to Sarah’s wishes and moved to Litchfield to become the head teacher at her school.

By the time John Brace arrived, the academy had long since moved from the Pierce sisters’ dining room to a large, white, Greek Revival building, on the village’s fashionable North Street, just one hundred yards closer to the center of town than the Beechers’ roomy residence. Each year up to 140 students came to the school from as far away as Ohio and the West Indies, as well as from New York and all parts of New England. Although Sarah Pierce had intended the school to vindicate the equality of the female intellect, she had not herself received the level of education she desired to provide her students and had been heavily influenced by condescending British advice books on teaching young women. Catharine Beecher, who attended the academy before John Brace’s arrival, recalled in her autobiography: At that time, the higher branches had not entered the female schools. Map drawing, painting, embroidery and the piano were the accomplishments sought, and history was the only study added to geography, grammar, and arithmetic.⁵ In their assigned essays the girls were expected to meditate only on such female virtues as contentment, cheerfulness, charity, and forgiveness.

All this changed once John Brace became the head teacher. His first assignment to Catharine’s younger sister Harriet, for example, was to write about The Difference Between the Natural and the Moral Sublime. And Harriet’s earliest literary triumph was an essay responding to Brace’s question: Can the immortality of the soul be proved by the light of nature?⁶

Under John Brace’s direction, Litchfield girls undertook a curriculum—including science, higher mathematics, logic, and Latin—that at the very least equaled that of most boys’ academies. In one subject area Litchfield girls clearly exceeded their counterparts at the male schools, and that was moral philosophy, which boys were not expected to study until college.

Although John Brace was far from being above the sexist double standards that prevailed in his day, his educational agenda had a decidedly feminist slant. He specifically worked against the stereotype of women as charming but superficial creatures who lacked the intellectual fortitude to master their emotional impulses. In an address to the graduating class of 1816, he explained that he wanted students to feel but to feel in subordination to reason. Education, he told the new graduates, would improve woman’s rank in society, placing her as the rational companion of man, not the slave of his pleasures or the victim of tyranny.⁷

As significant a figure as John Brace would be in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s life, and later also in Catharine Beecher’s, it was in fact through his marriage that he became most intimately connected with the Beecher family. Lucy Porter, Lyman Beecher’s sister-in-law, came to Litchfield for an extended visit in 1819. By early 1820 she and John Brace had married, and later that same year their first child, Mary, was born. The Braces continued to live with the Beechers until 1822, when they moved to a home of their own nearby. It was in this house, some four years afterward, that John and Lucy’s second child, Charles, was born.

During the early nineteenth century the United States was undergoing a dramatic shift in social organization. An economy composed primarily of small-scale independent entrepreneurs—farmers, craftspeople, and shopkeepers—was giving way to one of large-scale capitalists and industrialists, and decidedly economically dependent wage earners. Many people became wonderfully rich as a result of this transformation, and many became desperately poor. All of these changes—especially the fact that people increasingly worked outside the home—profoundly altered the roles of men and women, and the ways in which they understood and raised their children. Charles Loring Brace’s upbringing, like that of most of his generation, was the product of a clash between the old and the new ways—a clash that affected both the sort of aid he came to feel poor children most needed and the way that aid was understood by the larger society.

The Puritans of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries believed that children were born damned. This was not mere theology, but a fact parents witnessed every day in their children’s behavior. To Anne Bradstreet, sinning commenced with a child’s first breath:

Stained from birth with Adams sinfull fact,

Thence I began to sin as soon as act:

A perverse will, a love to what’s forbid,

A serpents sting in pleasing face lay hid:

A lying tongue as soon as it could speak,

And the fifth Commandment do daily break.⁸

In essence, the Puritans had what most people today would think of as an inverted image of the soul’s progress: starting in corruption and, through God’s grace, ending in innocence. The mechanism by which the soul was cleansed of original sin (Adams sinfull fact) was conversion, or being born again—a spontaneous and often ecstatic union of the individual with God. The problem was that there was no way to achieve conversion. God was almighty, absolutely free, and could not be constrained even by the obligation to reward goodness and punish sin. He had chosen that small portion of humanity he was going to save—the elect—for his own inscrutable reasons back before the beginning of time, and there was no way for men or women to change his mind. There was also no way to know for certain who was among the elect. Even one’s own apparent conversion might be an illusion spun by the Devil to lure one into the sin of pride. Some theologians maintained that the elect would not know they were saved until they found themselves in Paradise. Although God was technically free to grant second birth even to the most loathsome of sinners, most people assumed that he did not have much use for this freedom, and that the elect could be identified by their superior virtue—especially by their capacity for self-denial.

Adam and Eve fell because they were ambitious and put their own desires ahead of God’s. They wanted knowledge and to move up in the world (Your eyes shall be opened, said the serpent, and ye shall be as gods, knowing both good and evil). The child in Anne Bradstreet’s poem was not merely stained by the consequences of their ambition, but still possessed, from birth, by their perverse will, a love to what’s forbid. Puritans believed that virtue lay only in the suppression of what they called self-will and its replacement by a desire to serve, obey, and glorify God. For many Puritans the mere existence of a child’s will was nigh unto a perversity all by itself. John Robinson, the original minister at the Pilgrims’ Plymouth Colony, advised his parishioners:

Surely there is in all children . . . a stubbornness, and stoutness of mind arising from natural pride, which must, in the first place, be broken and beaten down; . . . Children should not know, if it could be kept from them, that they have a will in their own, but in the parents’ keeping; neither should these words be heard from them, save by way of consent, I will or I will not.⁹

Puritan parents loved their children as much as parents ever have, but they did not see love as the unalloyed blessing we generally understand it to be today. Love was, after all, yet another carnal impulse, and as such it might lead parents to shirk their responsibility both to God and to their children. Letting a pleasing face divert one from subjecting a child to necessary discipline was not only sinful but possibly a sign that both parent and child were headed for eternal damnation. According to one Puritan adviser, parents were to

Reviews for Orphan Trains

[jwood652 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Sending orphans on trains and leaving them with total strangers with little vetting or followup sounds horrible judging by modern standards. Charles Loring Brace was considered a visionary by many people as the founder of the CAS (Children's Aid Society). Around 250,000 children were processed between 1854 and 1929. They traveled from New York City to many destinations. I decided to read a book about these trains after going to a presentation, at the library, about orphan trains that delivered their "cargo" to Michigan. Unfortunately, since the record keeping and followup was shoddy at best, it is impossible to determine the overall success or failure of this effort. There are many accounts of incredible success stories and of children who suffered terrible abuse. The rampant problems of children abandoned on the streets of New York City including those in the desperately poor Five Points neighborhood compelled the CAS to act. This book gives us a good understanding of the morals and ethics of the times, the conditions the children endured, several examples of these riders, the life of Charles Loring Brace and the history of the orphan trains.

[tloeffler_3 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Several months ago, the MO Readers read a short book about the orphan trains in Missouri, and we thought we'd like to know more, so we read this one. Although it barely touched on Missouri, some of the stories he told were fascinating. However, I couldn't help feeling like the author had an agenda. He played up the bad stories and played down the good ones, and I felt like he was using a modern scale to weigh things that happened in the past. I am CERTAINLY not in favor of making children work to earn their keep, or beating them for little reason, but a lot of the situations he blamed on Brace were really just how things were in those days. In general, I believe that working on a farm, even working hard, had to beat the heck out of starving to death. And even though some of the adopting parents were cruel, they weren't much worse than some of the real parents the children were escaping. He attempted to be even-handed, but I felt like he was forcing himself to do it, and it didn't resonate with me.